Theodore of Mopsuestia

Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 350–428)

Theodore was born around 350 in Antioch, the great Syrian city on the Orontes, into a wealthy and well-connected family. His brother Polychronius would later become bishop of Apamea, and the household belonged to the educated Greek-speaking elite of the eastern empire. Antioch was a city of rhetoric schools and rival churches, and Theodore received the full classical education of his class, studying under the pagan orator Libanius. His fellow pupil in that classroom was John, later called Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed. The two young men were close, and when both turned toward the ascetic life they did so together, joining the community of Diodore of Tarsus and Carterius at the Asketerion near Antioch. There Theodore received the formation that would govern everything else: a rigorous grammatical-historical reading of Scripture, a suspicion of allegory, and a conviction that the humanity of Christ must be taken as seriously as his divinity.

The ascetic path did not come easily to him. Around 369 or 370 Theodore wavered, drawn back toward the law courts and the prospect of marriage, and John wrote him two letters urging his return, To Theodore After His Fall. Chrysostom's pleading is the earliest document we have of Theodore's inner life, and it shows a man who had to choose his vocation more than once. He returned to the monastic community and stayed. Diodore, who taught him, had a distinct vision of what theology should be, and Theodore absorbed it deeply; he later served as one of the great exegetes of what is called the Antiochene school.

Around 383 he was ordained a presbyter in Antioch, where he preached, taught, and began his enormous labor of commentary on the biblical books. In 392 he was consecrated bishop of Mopsuestia in Cilicia, a modest city in what is now southern Turkey, and he held the see for thirty-six years until his death. It was a quieter stage than Antioch, but not a withdrawn one. He took part in the controversies of the age, writing against the Arian theologian Eunomius and against Apollinaris of Laodicea, whose view that Christ lacked a human mind Theodore found intolerable. He also defended his friend Chrysostom after the latter's deposition in 403. Throughout his episcopate he kept writing, producing commentaries on nearly the entire Bible along with catechetical homilies and doctrinal treatises.

By the standards of his own lifetime, Theodore died in good standing. He was remembered in the East as the Interpreter, an honor that survives in the Church of the East to this day. The anecdote that he was at his death held to be in full communion with the church, and that his deeds were praised by contemporaries, matters because of what came after. Within a generation of his death, his theology was entangled in the Christological disputes of the fifth century. His pupil Nestorius, who became patriarch of Constantinople, was condemned at Ephesus in 431, and Theodore's writings were widely understood as the source of the doctrine that had been condemned. His emphasis on the distinction of Christ's two natures, so valuable against Apollinaris, now looked to his critics like a division of Christ into two persons. The argument over his orthodoxy would outlast the man by more than a century, culminating in the posthumous condemnation of his person and writings at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, a verdict that the Church of the East never accepted.

His Writing and Its Influence

Theodore began writing in the years of his presbyterate at Antioch, and the sheer scale of what he produced was remarkable even by the standards of a prolific age. He wrote commentaries on nearly the whole Bible, on the Psalms, the Minor Prophets, the Gospel of John, and the Pauline letters, along with a treatise on the Incarnation, works against Eunomius and Apollinaris, and a series of catechetical homilies on the Nicene Creed, the Lord's Prayer, baptism, and the Eucharist. He was also a polemicist of some bite: he wrote against allegorical interpretation as such, a work aimed at the Alexandrian habit of reading Scripture as a coded text. The commentary on the Minor Prophets and the commentary on the Pauline letters of Galatians through Philemon are the best preserved in the original Greek, the latter largely through a Latin translation. His method was disciplined and historical: attend to the grammar, the setting, the author's intention. He read the Old Testament as a real record of God's dealings with Israel rather than a storehouse of hidden Christian mysteries, and he admitted far fewer messianic prophecies than his contemporaries did. That restraint made him an acute interpreter and, to some, a dangerous one.

His catechetical homilies reward a reader differently. Delivered to candidates for baptism, they treat the sacraments as the means by which the faithful already participate in the heavenly order, and they carry a warmth that his commentaries seldom show. They survive complete only in Syriac, a fact that points to the strangest feature of his legacy: the transmission of his work was shaped by his condemnation. After the controversies of the fifth century, his writings were suppressed across much of the Greek and Latin world and the originals largely perished. They survived because Syriac-speaking Christians in the East translated and preserved them. At the school of Nisibis and in the Church of the East, Theodore became the Interpreter, the normative exegete, and his Christology, which holds that the divine Word united himself to a complete human nature, shaped the theology of an entire communion that stretched across Persia and, in time, into Central Asia and China.

The verdict against him came slowly and was never unanimous. His brother bishops cited his teaching at Ephesus and Chalcedon; the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 condemned the "Three Chapters," Theodore's person and writings among them, in a decision driven as much by imperial politics and the hope of reconciling the anti-Chalcedonians as by theology. Many in the West were uneasy about condemning the dead, and the controversy it provoked divided the Latin church for decades. In the twentieth century, scholars returned to the question with fresh evidence. The recovery of the Syriac catechetical homilies by Alphonse Mingana in the 1930s, and the careful work of Francis Sullivan, R. A. Norris, and others, raised the possibility that Theodore had been judged by the use made of him rather than by what he intended. A reassessment is still ongoing and not all agree. What is not in doubt is his weight in the history of interpretation: the grammatical-historical reading of Scripture that later flowered in the Reformation and in modern critical scholarship has Antiochene roots, and Theodore is its most thorough early practitioner.

Who should read Theodore: Readers who want to see how the early church read the Bible without leaning on allegory, and who are curious about the eastern Christian tradition that Western history usually passes over. He is particularly valuable for students of Christology who wish to understand a position the Church of the East has defended for sixteen centuries, and for anyone who senses that the sacramental life needs a more serious theology than it usually receives. He is not for readers seeking a settled verdict on his orthodoxy, nor for those who want devotional immediacy; the commentaries are dense and exacting, and only the catechetical homilies approach the warmth of pastoral address. He is for those willing to read a condemned theologian carefully and decide for themselves.